An Analysis of Cause-Related Marketing Implementation Strategies Through Social Alliance: Partnership Conditions and Strategic Objectives

Assignment 13- Journal Article Critique

Authors' names: Liu, Gordon and Ko, Wai-wai

Title of article: An Analysis of Cause-Related Marketing Implementation Strategies Through Social Alliance: Partnership Conditions and Strategic Objectives

Title of Journal: Journal of Business Ethics, 100.2 , 2011, 253-281

As the Green movement strongly emerges and dominates the media attention as the new "right thing to do" and companies in the United States of America and all over the world realizing how important it is to reflect a positive social position as a strategy, alliances between corporate companies and non-profits have emerged. Non-profits who have a positive standing in communities realized that this position is valuable and could assist corporate companies in sharing some of the positive social standing in exchange for various benefits. It is a legal "quid pro quo" cause-related marketing, where everyone benefits, as long as the terms of this partnership are accepted by both parties. In their article, the authors discuss and present the various Cause-Related Marketing (CRM) implementation approaches and how the different parties involved in each type chose the strategy(Gordon & Wai-wai, 2011, p. 253).

The authors provide in their article various background research information on the subject of corporate social responsibility and document well their sources. They clearly define the strategy to pursue corporate social giving as an investment by shareholders who are able to calculate the returns for their company from such actions. The authors refer to studies by Menon and Menon 1997 and Orlitzky et al. 2003, on the subject. The authors further present the fact that company have evolved in transforming the purely philanthropical giving into a business activity that has a commercial value as presented by Bhattacharya and Sen, 2004.

The article presents various facts found from a variety of sources on the different CRM implementation approaches. The article provides a great summary in a tabulated format, providing to the reader the four different approaches: Sponsorship, transaction-based, joint-promotion and donation in-kind. The summary table provides a description of each, with selected reference literature on each, example of conventional delivery pattern and an example of social alliance delivery pattern.(Gordon & Wai-wai, 2011, p. 254)

The authors provide information on each approach from the various sources. In this article, they have completed a research in which they focus particularly on the social alliance delivery pattern of the CRM campaign. They investigate both parties' preferences and initial positions in negotiating the formation of the social alliance regarding different CRM implementation strategies. In their article, they summarize the various